Intuitively, I think Microsoft's cloud growth is still in front of it. It's got a big customer base that's been waiting for it to simplify cloud computing -- and support it. Until April, Azure public IaaS was in developer oreview, not a generally available and supported service. it's also got a presence in China.

I absolutely agree on the NSA angle, partnering instead of building proprietary will definitely give a bit of an advantage. But I'm really curious as to whether there is really that much demand for Azure based clouds. When you look at AWS, VMware and OpenStack, is there really that much interest in Azure. I get the license pricing advantage over VMware, but what other key benefit would make it a better option for organizations, especially on a global scale, that would warrant such a huge investment in Azure environments?

Given all the headlines about U.S. based businesses losing business abroad due to NSA snooping, I'm wondering if one of Microsoft's motivations for partnering rather than building its own data centers is to provide an extra layer of separation (real or perceived) from the U.S. Government. Would-be customers in Europe, for example, would be able to say their data is housed at a TeleComputing data center, for example, rather than describing it as "a Microsoft Azure regional data center."

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.